Lightly and rapidly though my
shorter articles came into being, this larger task was very long in
hand. Not that I had little heart for my work; on the contrary, no
question interested me more than those on which my book hinged; but
there were only certain of them with which, as yet, I was equal to
dealing.
First and foremost came the question of the nature of the producing
mind, the possibility of showing a connection between its faculties and
deriving them from one solitary dominating faculty, which would thus
necessarily reveal itself in every aspect of the mind. It puzzled me,
for example, how I was to find the source whence Pascal's taste, both
for mathematics and religious philosophy, sprang. Next came the question
of the possibility of a universally applicable scientific method of
criticism, regarded as intellectual optics. If one were to define the
critic's task as that of understanding, through the discovery and
elucidation of the dependent and conditional contingencies that occur in
the intellectual world, then there was a danger that he might approve
everything, not only every form and tendency of art that had arisen
historically, but each separate work within each artistic section. If it
were no less the critic's task to distinguish between the genuine and
the spurious, he must at any rate possess a technical standard by which
to determine greater or lesser value, or he must be so specially and
extraordinarily gifted that his instinct and tact estimate infallibly.
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